The Spirit of "Ramble Tamble"

Musical origin myths are porous. As soon as you think you have a grasp on who influenced whom or where a particular sound came from, someone opens up a valve in the floor and your whole theory drains into another room and there you are, looking like a total jerk for not knowing that LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" is just Killing Joke's "Change" and that "All My Friends" is pretty much just every New Order song ever. Digging into the past for sonic God particles is a time-honored music-geek tradition-- but of course it can sometimes be insufferable, too. I used to work with a guy who told me he didn’t like LCD Soundsystem, because he'd "rather listen to all the bands that they sound like."

But at the risk of sounding insufferable, here’s my own personal God particle theory: Some of the best jams in indie rock sound like the breakdown of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s "Ramble Tamble".

If you don’t know "Ramble Tamble", that’s understandable. It was never a single, it’s never been featured in any movie or TV show, and it was never put on either of CCR’s popular best-of comps, Chronicle, Vol.1 & Vol. 2. It’s the seven-minute opener to their uneven 1970 album Cosmo’s Factory, with a rockabilly intro and outro and a four-minute psych-rock breakdown. It’s one of a few protracted CCR tunes, along with "Suzie Q", "Heard It Through The Grapevine", and "Keep On Chooglin’" but the jam in this tune isn’t just CCR chooglin’ along. It’s got a simple vamp and layers of guitar building on each other, and a piano line that eventually connects all the moving parts.

That’s about it-- nothing too fancy. The song could be marked for inclusion on various best-of lists, micro or macro. It's my darkhorse nomination to unseat "Free Bird" as the best southern rock song (CCR hailing from California notwithstanding.) And it definitely could be used in place of "Gimme Shelter" in like all of Martin Scorsese’s movies ("Layla" in Goodfellas, too.) But its true legacy is in a form to which, willingly or not, some of the best little moments in indie rock have nodded.

Under the hood of the breakdown I'm talking about, there’s four-chord progression based in D (for music theory nerds, it’s D Mixolydian): A minor, C, G, D. This little riff is common and simple, but when you put it on repeat, it takes off into this exalting major-key groove-- something that is primed for stacking layers of harmonies on and on until an inevitable climax. But on a less technical level, the spirit of “Ramble Tamble” is mainly about two things: suspension and propulsion.

Whether conscious or not, here are a handful of incredible songs that pull from the breakdown in "Ramble Tamble":

It shows up in the chorus and and the end of Pavement’s "In The Mouth A Desert".

It’s the basis for the ending jam on Deerhunter's "Nothing Ever Happened", where the guitar starts with an arpeggio and then ends with a slide guitar riff (albeit the sliding is done with a pedal, not an actual slide).

The final part of the New Pornographers’ "The Bleeding Heart Show" follows a similar chord progression.

Most of the Horrors’ "Still Life" uses the same three or four chords over and over through the whole song, with that backwards guitar line that connects the whole thing.

Phosphorescent’s beautiful "Quotidian Beasts" has the same feel for the whole song.

There’s plenty more. Even "Ramble Tamble" isn’t exactly an origin point, since you could probably cite the end of "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)" as one of its major influences, or "Sister Ray" if you want to talk about what really influenced longform jamming in indie rock. But until someone opens the valve in the floor, this is my little origin myth-- one step closer to figuring out why I like the things I like. Most pop music rests on the 12-bar blues and this chord progression, but "Ramble Tamble" remains an unsung hero whose spirit keeps several indie rock songs going on and on into the ether.